Midori, a lightweight browser using Gtk+ and WebKit.

Every passing week, Gecko feels more and more like old news. I love having options, though, so I hope they catch up.

Via reddit.

Charles of ars technica: “Intel Macs overtake PPC Macs in October”

But as for Safari 3, it’s only at 0.62% thus far. Charles concludes:

What this shows you is that most people use the browser that comes with the computer.

Exactly. Unless, that is, the bundled browser sucks so much that the alternatives are quite compelling, most people simply don’t switch. Which is the main reason for Internet Explorer’s extremely high market share – and also that for it having been in decline ever since Firefox started being not just reasonably good, but unarguably better in some respects.

Simply awesome. After the recent additions downloadable fonts support for TrueType through @font-face and client-side database storage, WebKit now sports another feature other engines don’t have at this point.

Building upon CSS working group drafts for the rotation property, -webkit-transform goes beyond that by adjoining support for scaling, translating, skewing and affine transformations.

Denis built a nice test page (compare to the original, where a similar effect is done manually) that uses rotation and a box shadow. You’d need a recent nightly to see the effect.

As noted, “At the moment transforms do not affect layout”, so the bottom rotated image slightly ‘eats into’ some of the text. Other than that, it looks great, and is something I can see myself using on my future design, albeit it in a far more subtle, less distracting way.

Why didn’t anyone tell me?

On September 26, Apple released Public Beta Seed 310A15 of Safari for Windows. You need a free ADC account this time, so I guess they aren’t quite as confident about this build. Nonetheless, there’s quite a few nice fixes and improvements noted in the release notes.

Surfin’ Safari: “Downloadable Fonts”

WebKit now supports CSS @font-face rules.

Sweet!

We still have that copyright problem to deal with, but the Open Font License and good ol’ Creative Commons should help with that.

That there will inevitably be abuses where people – out of ignorance, or deliberately – put fonts whose licenses do not allow distribution into their style sheets shouldn’t be relevant, and shouldn’t have stopped vendors either about a decade ago when both Microsoft and Netscape gave downloadable fonts a first (very much unsuccessful) try.

But with significantly raised awareness on and inclination towards open licensing formats, there is hope it will work out better this time.